MELBOURNE’S POPULATION by Kelvin Thompson

This was sent in to us, with the following comment: (The sender was keen to point out they are not an ALP voter, just that they appreciated the content…)

It is worth reading through from Carbon tax to Education, Skilled Immegration to Boat people, Green Wedges to Traffic. See what you make of it.

“I hope that you have some spare time to read the attached speech from Kelvin Thomson,former Attorney General and an elite visionary.”

MELBOURNE’S POPULATIONSpeech by Kelvin Thomson to Malvern East Group Annual General Meeting7 September 2011 Member for Wills
Residents like you who love and value the community in which they live and who don’t want to see it destroyed by developments in their street, neighbourhood or suburb get told, we have no choice- people have to be allowed to live somewhere. We have to accommodate Melbourne’s growing population.

And it is certainly true that Melbourne’s population is growing- 200 people a day, 1500 a week, 75,000 each year.

But it is wrong to think that growth is inevitable, that there is nothing we can do about it. That growth is almost entirely a product of Australia’s net overseas migration, which in recent years has ratcheted up to 200,000.

This is not boat people, by the way- in the first six months this year (2011) Australia had less than 1700 boat people- it would take 30 years at that rate to fill the MCG, whereas the overall migration program is filling 2 MCGs every year.
In August 2009 I gave a speech to the Parliament which advanced two propositions.First, that the world needed to stabilize its population. Second, that Australia needed to stabilize its population.
In that speech I said that there were plenty of problems in the world – global warming, food shortages, water shortages, housing affordability, overcrowded cities, transport congestion, fisheries collapse, species extinctions, increasing prices, waste and terrorism. And I said that every one of those problems is either caused by, or exacerbated by, the global population explosion.
You are never going to successfully tackle those problems unless you’re prepared to face up to the real cause of them – skyrocketing population growth.